Facebook has made it impossible to delete Pages – dark patterns everywhere
I'm honestly shocked at how bad the current Facebook interface has become. I’m trying to delete a Page I own, and the platform basically makes it impossible. The options have moved or disappeared, the Page Settings menu leads to the wrong profile, Business Suite doesn’t show the Page, and the “Access and Control” section doesn’t list it at all.
Facebook keeps bouncing me between: – personal profile settings – business portfolio settings – Meta Business Suite – classic Page UI
None of them give the actual option to delete the Page. It’s like the platform actively hides the feature.
And here’s the worst part: I AM the admin. I can publish on the Page. I can edit it. I can manage everything… except delete it.
I get that Meta wants to keep pages alive for engagement and ad data, but blocking users from removing something they own is straight-up abusive UX. No user should have to waste hours navigating four different interfaces to do something basic like “delete a page.”
If anyone has figured out the REAL way to delete a Page in 2025 with the new Facebook UI (which keeps changing), please share. Meta’s documentation is outdated, and their support is nonexistent.
This shouldn’t be this hard.
Semantic Query Engines with Matthew Russo (MIT)
AI is transforming Database Systems. Perhaps the biggest impact so far has been natural language to query language translations, or Text-to-SQL. However, another massive innovation is brewing.
AI presents new Semantic Operators for our query languages. For example, we are all familiar with the WHERE filter. Now we have AI_WHERE, in which an LLM, or another AI model, computes the filter value without needing it to already be available in the database!
```sql SELECT * FROM podcasts AI_WHERE “Text-to-SQL” in topics ```
Semantic Filters are just the tip of iceberg, the roster of Semantic Operators further includes Semantic Joins, Map, Rank, Classify, Groupby, and Aggregation!
And it doesn’t stop there! One of the core ideas for Relational Algebra and how its influenced Database Systems is query planning and finding the optimal order to apply filters. For example, let’s say you have two filters, the car is red and the car is a BMW. Now let’s say the dataset only contains 100 BMWs, but 50,000 red cars!! Applying the BMW filter first will limit the size of the set for the next filter!
This foundational idea has all sorts of extensions now that LLMs are involved! This opportunity is giving rise to new query engines and declarative optimizers such as Palimpzest, LOTUS, and others!
I am SUPER EXCITED to publish the 131st episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Matthew Russo, a Ph.D. student at MIT!
So many interesting nuggets in this podcast, loved discussing these things with Matthew, and I hope you find it interesting!
YouTube: https://youtu.be/koPBr9W4qU0
Spotify: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/ddUhVMmLoYb
Medium: https://medium.com/@connorshorten300/semantic-query-engines-with-matthew-russo-weaviate-podcast-131-131a42bbc521
ZkOrigoPlus – Compliance Validator Bridging Bank and Blockchain via ISO20022
I’ve been working on a stateless compliance and validation engine that runs across multiple chains (Ethereum, XRPL, Hedera, Polygon, Stellar, Bitcoin). Everything is processed per-request — no customer records, no logs, no storage. Just deterministic validation.
What it currently does • Wallet + transaction checks (multi-chain) • AML, basic KYC logic, RWA attestation structure • Zero-knowledge proof validation framework • ISO 20022 XML generation (pacs.008, pain.001) • Basic cross-border rules engine • AI/ML advisory layer (optional — model loads from S3 and runs at inference time, no data retention)
Infrastructure • Fully serverless: API Gateway + Lambda • 6 chain validators • 6 compliance modules • Sandbox + production environments • Stateless by design (no PII, no telemetry tracking unless user enables it)
Live Demo • MVP validator: https://mvp.zkorigoplus.com (simple UI showing chain + compliance outputs) • API documentation: https://zkorigoplus.com
What I’m looking for Not trying to sell anything — just want feedback from engineers who’ve built compliance, payments, or chain infrastructure before.
Main questions: 1. Does the stateless approach make sense long-term? 2. Any obvious gaps in the architecture? 3. Is the multi-chain abstraction too broad or reasonable? 4. Should the AI advisory stay optional or be removed entirely?
Happy to share more details if helpful.
Ask HN: Reason for the DDoS attacks on DALnet circa 2002?
Watching DALnet get almost completely destroyed by sustained DDoS attacks around 2002 was a formative memory for me, but I never did figure out why it happened, or what made DALnet more vulnerable than other IRC networks. Many of the simple explanations (warez? extortion? demo of botnet-for-hire?) don't really seem likely, and don't fit the facts.
Does anyone know what the story really was?
Cloudflare is working again for my servers (US East)
Found out from my server logs.
Ask HN: Why does Y Combinator seem to be consistently funding AI slop?
This is one of the recent ones that I came across - https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1988366241460089118
Of late it looks like I've been noticing more of such pointless businesses and I'm not alone. What do you think?
Ask HN: Cloud providers are losing in favor of bare-metal?
Lately, I’ve noticed a new trend on X: Devs (and indie hackers in particular) are ditching cloud providers and jumping straight to bare-metal servers like Hetzner.
Honestly, I think the big cloud companies just haven’t kept up. Their services feel clunky compared to the standalone alternatives. Just try comparing Vercel’s dev experience to Amplify’s, and you’ll see what I mean. On top of that, AWS has gotten way stingier with startup credits.
Put those two together, and it’s no surprise fewer people are hosting their MVPs on AWS. It’s tough to stay under $150/month with a database and a server, while on bare metal you can grab 16 GB RAM for around $20/month.
- Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground? - And for those using bare-metal: how do you handle DB backups, CI/CD, and pulling logs? - Would you scale something using bare-metal servers?
[Carlos](https://github.com/clostao)
Ask HN: Why All the Indonesian Spam?
The "new" page with dead articles shown has about 5 submissions per page with Indonesian titles and spam contents usually containing a phone number.
Sometimes they're posted by brand-new accounts, sometimes it's "aged" accounts that have never posted before. For instance, this one created in 2021 has posted 12 times in the last 2 hours:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheDarkLegend
(you'll need to have showdead turned on)
Is this the world's most misguided phishing attempt? AFAIK dead posts don't get picked up by any search engines etc...
Claude Is Down
https://status.claude.com/
Cloudflare is down and causing outages at X, OpenAI
Another multi-platform outage strikes, as Cloudflare suffers issues and triggers downtime on popular websites like X (formerly Twitter), as confirmed by the official Cloudflare Status page.
It started around 6:00 AM ET, when Cloudflare's support portal provider started "experiencing issues", and saw the degradation of Elon Musk's social platform, alongside popular video games like League of Legends reporting issues via downdetector.
An exposed .git folder let us dox a phishing campaign
This past Friday afternoon, a member in our Discord server reported a phishing email pointing to a fake login page.
We took up to research it and because of clumsy decisions by the attacker we got their GitHub and their operational Telegram bot.
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/FTy4mrH
Sometimes the attacker incompetence can be a defender's best weapon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The phishing page was a standard clone of an "email", unbranded anf generic service. A bit of gobuster reconnaissance and we got the site's .git directory publicly accessible and listing its contents.
Inspecting of the requests also got us the first Telegram bot token. This is the digital equivalent of leaving the blueprints to your entire operation, including past versions and deleted files, lying on the front lawn.
We pulled the repository, found automated deployments and multiple fake pages with different hardcoded Telegram bot tokens and Chat IDs.
With the source code, repo and the active Telegram bot token, we filed detailed abuse reports:
- GitHub: We reported the repository containing the phishing kit's source code. It was taken down for violating TOS.
- Telegram: We reported the bot using the provided token and chat ID, leading to its removal.
- Hosting Provider: The malicious site was reported and taken offline.
Lesson learned? Never deploy a .git folder to production. Even if you are a criminal.
Acknowledgement: This was a collaborative effort by members of the BeyondMachines Discord community. The crowdsourced speed and collaboration helped us take this down very fast.
Ask HN: Why is there black line on top? I guess not because of Cloudflare outage
Built a Pomodoro timer for ADHD brains: always visible progress bar
One big problem I have with pomodoro apps: they disappear. Even when the timer's running, I forget about it.
So I built a macOS app that runs as a persistent, always-on-top sidebar. When you collapse it, it becomes a 3px colored progress bar.
That constant visual reminder helps my time-blindedness stay on track.
Curious if anyone else struggles with the same thing.
Cloudflare Down, Again
What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
literal shower-thought i had tonight as i was thinking about how at work we all don't like dealing with our helm charts because the syntax and structure ends up looking so ugly and it just feels wrong (not to mention the multiple different approaches of handling kubernetes resources in multiple different pipelines.
i try to see beyond any initial repulsion to weird looking code because i know that it may be super functional. but it got me thinking: what makes code beautiful? what makes code "high quality"? (other than that it results in a working, performant, and robust software program obviously).
so i'm curious -- can you show me the best code you've encountered? it can be a small snippet or it can be a "slice of a library" or an architecture etc. have you written anything yourself that you are super proud of?
Ask HN: Engineers working AI tools. Are you working more or less?
Curious whether AI tooling are making engineers more productive with more free time or more productive with even less free time.
Ask HN: What's the Least Amount of Process a Small Team Can Get Away With?
Before we sat around screens we sat around campfires telling stories. We’re hardwired to be storytellers, and that’s how we fundamentally connect with other people and understand the world.
I’ve been thinking about how KISS a small team could go and still stay productive and aligned. This is my take:
1) The story unfolds. Repeating meetings where team hash out the next steps to be done before the next meeting
2) The plot. A plain text document in the repo showing what has been done, what needs doing, and any related notes or comments
Here is an example of the plain text story/narrative of the project:
```
# Project: Cloud Cost Dashboard
Enable easy access to cloud cost data for the team.
## Integration
DONE Cloud cost API integrated with billing system @bob
## Dash board
Dashboard must pull data from AWS, Azure, and GCP for comparison.
TODO Set up a cloud cost reporting dashboard @alice TODO Train team on how to use the dashboard @alice
```
The following rules apply:
- A task is either in status TODO or DONE and it fits exactly on one line
- Add @name to assign tasks
- New TODOs are added at the bottom (so look there for tasks to pick)
- Feel free to add any free text/notes etc to the file to provide context and insight
As the project progresses the story unfolds and self documents.
BONUS: Use the task line for the commit message
Some questions:
- Does this approach seem like enough to keep a small team productive and focused?
- What essentials are missing (given a small team context)?
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Ask HN: How does one stay motivated to grind through LeetCode?
I was recently laid off at a big tech company after 10 years. And now I am facing the harsh reality of trying to crack leetcode medium/hard problems (something I never managed to do routinely while I was working at this company). Is anyone here in a similar situation or has been in one? If so, how do you keep yourself motivated to solve multiple problems a day, especially knowing you are actually never going to work on such problems as part of an actual job?
Edit: I need to practice leetcode because the interview process for almost every software engineering role (especially in the Bay Area) seems to require going through at least one round of coding challenge based on leetcode medium/hard problem. I did not call it out earlier because I thought this is a very obvious point. Perhaps, I should have clarified that I am mostly targeting software engg roles.
Ask HN: What were the best books you read in 2025?
Looking for some inspiration for some books to read during the Christmas holidays
Which Class Is Better?
Signing up for classes and I am debating between a Natural Language Processing class and a LLM engineering class. Which one is the better option? I feel like there’s been a lot of recent discourse about LLMs becoming irrelevant in the near future.
Natural Language Processing: Introduces the computational modeling of human language; the ongoing effort to create computer programs that can communicate with people in natural language; and current applications of the natural language field, such as automated document classification, intelligent query processing, and information extraction. Topics include computational models of grammar and automatic parsing, statistical language models and the analysis of large text corpora, natural language semantics and programs that understand language, models of discourse structure, and language use by intelligent agents. Course work includes formal and mathematical analysis of language models and implementation of working programs that analyze and interpret natural language text. Knowledge of statistics is helpful.
Engineering LLM-Integrated Systems: Studies the software engineering foundations for systems that integrate large language models (LLMs). Examines how LLM-integrated systems turn natural language instructions into actions. Offers opportunities to build systems with natural and fluid interfaces, integrate them with existing software, rigorously test their behavior, and understand their failure modes and limitations.
Not sure which one will be more helpful! For context I am a data science major but interested in working in machine learning in the future!
Ask HN: How do you monitor the threads on HN you are engaging with?
I keep finding myself commenting on threads and then forgetting to check back. HN doesn’t have built in notifications, so I’m curious how people here actually keep track of discussions they are part of.
What’s the best workflow you’ve found to follow active conversations without missing replies?
Ask HN: How to learn concurrency?
Race condition, producer consumer, and cool stuffs like that? I do java
Ask HN: Senior people, how did your career evolve?
I am a software engineer with about 20 years of experience, and lately I have felt a bit lost about what to do going forward.
For the context, I have always been passionate about software engineering, I started very young and have worked in it non stop every since. I mostly worked broadly in web development and have pretty-much mastered all areas and layers of the stack (infra and cloud, databases, backend, network, front-end and even a bit of mobile...). I've also been an indie game dev on my free time ever since.
For the last 5~10 years I have not been evolving or learning anymore in my daily job, and feel that I've basically seen everything. It only feels repetitive, and as I've lived through many tech bubbles, I don't get much interested in the major trends because the fundamentals are the same and everything old gets new again.
Over the years, I've worked in many companies, from big ones to fresh startups, B2B and B2C, in direct and as a contractor as well as web dev agencies. I've also found out that while I like tech leading and the various design and spec phases of software, I don't like managing people. I do not want to evolve as a CTO either because of those reasons and the endless meetings. But the industry seems to think that the normal path forward is to quit being a developer and manage people instead, which is a totally alien idea to me because it involves completely different skills and knowledge.
I am now at a step in my career where I find it impossible to find a company where my knowledge and experience is really valued and useful. I'm often the most senior, more than even the managers and CTOs, but have less power or influence and am just another cog in the machine. I see the mistakes being made and know what it will cost (because I've been there and done that many times), I do my best to explain that and recommend alternatives, but more often than not it still happens anyway.
I've long considered switching to game dev professionally since I find that it has a lot more fun and interesting challenge, and I yet have lots of things to learn there. But as a husband and a dad, the reputation of the industry (low salary and crunch time) makes it difficult to seriously consider. I'm now thinking that freelancing my be my best bet going forward, and then explore and build things from here.
I know that there are more senior (30, 40+ years...) people around here, so I'm curious to hear your experiences. Did you ever feel the same way, what did you do and how did you finally find a satisfying daily job?
MCP traffic analysis tool with playground
Complete MCP traffic analysis tool with desktop app for Mac, Windows GitHub: https://github.com/mcp-shark/mcp-shark Web: https://www.mcpshark.sh/
Ask HN: What could possibly happen so people would want to read more?
We now have IG/TikTok/YT Shorts. First it was mails instead of letter, text/fb instead of mails, then images, then videos, now shorter videos. We might also fill in for the other senses, not sure, but then that's the end of the line.
There is no reason to assume that things will change direction, unless there is some force that makes it so. I am trying to think of a scenario where people would do more of something archaic like reading in the future, than they do now.
What could that be? I can't come up with anything. Does it matter? Can we be fine without reading?
Ask HN: Is Computer Science still a good choice?
I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately because I’m pursuing a CS degree but I’ve been second guessing my decision because all I ever hear about now is people either getting laid off or new graduates having a hard time landing entry level roles, never mind the AI of it all not that I believe it is a feasible replacement for actual programmers but at the same time it’s hard to tell if it has the potential to be that later on. I’m still a couple years shy of graduation but it doesn’t seem like enough time for things to improve if ever.